Igbo Separatist Movement and the Nigeria-Biafra Post-War Triple ‘R’: Resolving Nigeria’s Security Dilemma

Nigeria is a country under the challenge of separatist movements for full political secession and greater autonomy due to a combination of the post-colonial State, perceived sense of ethnic groups’ inequalities, and socio-economic conditions. A separatist movement undermines a state's national security.[i]  At the end of Nigeria-Biafra Civil War which was facilitated by secession of the South-East ethnic group, the Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon proclaimed that there was no victor, no vanquished and assured the war-ravaged South-East of a triple programme of rehabilitation, reconstruction and reconciliation as an earnest post-war strategic peace-building effort towards a nation with healthy, strong, stable, virile and equal opportunity for national development. Disappointingly, successive Nigerian leaders played the rhetoric of ‘unity in diversity’ in place of a nation and institutionalized social, political, and economic deprivation against the South-East people, who fought a separatist war on the side of Biafra. Our study is anchored in the relative deprivation theory to validate the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra as Nigeria’s National Security Dilemma. 

[i] Bayo Adekanye, Linking Conflict Diagnosis, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Management in Contemporary Africa: Selected Essays Surulere, (Lagos: Ababa Press Ltd, 2007), 80.